…And Newbies
I love dancers. But I have a soft spot for two types of dancers in particular: male dancers and newbies.
Now, before you get all accusatory on me, my soft spot for male dancers has nothing to do with attraction of any kind. It’s more admiration. Male dancers, but especially young male dancers, get so much flack for being dancers. Imagine being in high school and having people know you take ballet classes? Can you imagine how much teasing they must endure? Truth be told, you must really, really love something to deal with all of that and not chicken out. Thus, I assume, rightly or not, that male dancers must love ballet at least as much as I do, if not more.
Also, male dancers inherently jump higher than us ballerinas. And that just looks awesome. We had a visitor in our class demonstrate his grande jetés the other night. This kid is 15 years old and has legs of pure muscle. Just muscle. He could literally jump over my head and stick the landing - at 15. It was awesome to watch. So watching male dancers gives you something to aspire to - my buddy Norman has started competitions with us girls in his class when we do changements.
I also love newbies. Adult newbies are the best - they are so eager to learn, even when they start out intimidated. A newbie in one of my classes was so scared to watch us at the barre and so confused when the teacher started dishing out random French words she tried to leave. But when that happens we just flock around the newbie and start demonstrating - "no, see you’ll be fine - I just started learning again too. This is first position, with your feet in a V…" "See, she wants us to fondue, which means to melt - just like the cheese dip. So that helps you visual the motion - you melt down into a deep bend, then stretch your legs out long and slowly like you’re pulling them apart…"
You can imagine our delight, then, when we got a male newbie on Monday.
This poor kid is trying to dance barefoot (ouch!), utterly confused. He couldn’t for the life of him figure out how many steps to take before trying to jump, and he certainly couldn’t figure out how to bend one leg while keeping the other leg straight.
We ate him up.
After class, all of us crowded around him: "you’re doing just fine, you’ll get the hang of it." "Don’t worry if it’s confusing, especially with all the French words - you’ll get used to it once you know what they mean." "Just watch everyone else to follow along." "I have a video you can borrow to practice the positions." "If you go online there’s a great dictionary of all the terms with videos demonstrating how they’re supposed to look."
It’s a great feeling, passing on the love. I hope he comes back.
